Text formatting options

There seems to be no shortage of options for changing the appearance of text within Word. And some of those changes relate to the overall appearance of the font that you're working with, and others relate to how the paragraphs are laid out. For example, let's take a look at the Font options, the options that allow you to change the appearance of the individual letters and words. Within your documents. I'll go ahead and start off by selecting a line of text here, just the title line in this case. And then we'll explore all the various options in the Font section of the Home tab on the ribbon.

The first option is the Font pop-up, and this allows us to change the appearance of the font, to change the actual font face for the text that we've selected. And of course, there are many options available. There are fonts that are included with Microsoft Office. You can download fonts from a variety of sources, purchase entire libraries of fonts, and find other other sources as well. One of the great things about the font pop-up here in Microsoft Word, is that it actually shows you a preview of the font itself.

And so you can get a sense of what that font looks like just by scrolling through the list. Now, you might have other fonts available, fonts beyond what I have here. Some of the fonts that I have, you might not have access to, but you certainly have a wide range of fonts to choose from. I'll go ahead and just select one of the fonts here. And you'll see that the text is updated accordingly. In addition to the font face, we can change the size of the text itself. And the unit of measure here is the point size. You don't really need to worry too much about the particulars of how that's calculated.

But bear in mind that a smaller number means a smaller font size, and a larger number means a larger font size. You'll notice that there are a handful of preset options available from the pop-up and you might think that you're restricted to only those sizes. But that's not the case. Let's say for example that you decide that 28 is not quite big enough. But 36, is too big. Let's assume that you want a value of around 30 points for the font. You can simply enter that value within the box here. I will go ahead and type 30 for example, and then press Enter on the keyboard, and you can see that that font size is changed to 30 points. Down below you'll find a variety of very common font options. The first is bold and that's very straight forward, it just makes the text a little heavier so that it stands out more.

Next we have italic, and of course that causes the text to be slanted, also for emphasis. And finally, we have the Underline option, and you can see if I just simply click that Underline button, I get, as you might expect, a line underneath the selected text. But I can also change the overall appearance of that underline by clicking the pop-up associated with that Underline button. So, for example, I can make a double underline or a dotted underline. I can choose any of these available options. In this case, I'll go ahead and use that Wave option, just to make that text really stand out a little bit. I'll then go ahead and select some other text.

I'll go ahead and select the Book One line here, and we'll take a look at the next option, which is Strikethrough. Now, this is an option that some people make extensive use of, and some people never use at all. It allows you to create text that has a line through it. So that it's obviously struck out, so that it obviously is intended to be removed. So the question is, why wouldn't you just remove the text? Well, in many cases, you might want to show the text. For example, in a legal document, you're showing what text is being changed. So we strike out one bit of text and add additional text, or replacement text next to it. I'll go ahead and turn off that Strikeout feature though, and next we have the Subscript and Superscript options.

These generally speaking have a specialized use. The Subscript option for example, if I type H20 for water, I could then select the 2, and make that 2 subscript, which is how we present molecular notation. I'll also go ahead and type a formula here. E equals mc squared. Except at the moment it's just a 2, because the 2 should be superscript. So I can select that 2, and then click that superscript button, and it's moved up to the appropriate location.

So obviously some relatively specialized options. You might use this for footnotes for example. But it's not a feature that's used all that often but when you need it, it's so nice to have it easily available. I'm going to select the title line once again to take a look at the next option and that is our Case option. In other words, do we want uppercase, lowercase, sentence case, do we want to capitalize each word? I'll go ahead and select each of these options in turn. You can see that sentence cases causes only the first letter in the selection to be capitalized all other letters are lowercase.

Next we have all lowercase, which causes all of the letters to be lowercase. The next option is uppercase which is obviously all caps. Then we have capitalize each word, which causes the first letter in every single word to be capitalized. And then we can also toggle the case. We can reverse it. So if it's all caps and we want it to be not all caps. Or whatever the case might be. For example if you had Caps Lock on when you didn't intend for it to be. You could simply use this Toggle option to reverse that selection.

But in this case, I wanted to capitalize each word. So I'll choose that option from the pop up. We can also highlight text if we want to draw attention to it, or for example, if we're editing a document and we want someone to pay attention to a particular element. I can select the portion of the text, and then click the Highlight option and choose the color that I would like to use in order to highlight that text. And speaking of the color for text, I can actually change the color of the text altogether. I'll go ahead and select that title. And then click the Font Color option, and then I can choose a particular color that I would like to use for that font.

Now let's assume that your making some changes, for example, I've made the title rather large, and changed some of the other attributes. And maybe I'm going to make the subtitle and other information here, a little bit larger and bold, but then I decide that all of this text should be a little bit bigger. I can increase or decrease the size of text, without changing the relationship between the sizes for different texts. For example, the title here is much larger than the sub-title sections here. I'll go ahead and select all of those items. And then, I can increase or decrease the size of the font, using the Grow Font and Shrink Font buttons. And this will adjust all of the settings relative to the existing size. So as I increase the size of the font for example, the relative relationship remains the same.

The title is still much larger than the subtitles here, but all of them are getting larger or smaller as the case may be. Now obviously I've just been playing around with all of the various options here, so that you can see how they work within a document. But the key thing to keep in mind is that we have tremendous flexibility in terms of changing the overall appearance of the text in our documents.